(Bloomberg) -- Rwanda has identified the source of its first-ever outbreak of the highly virulent Marburg disease from mining conducted in a cave that has fruit bats.
“That’s where we found our index case,” Rwandan Health Minister Sabin Nsanzimana said in a briefing Thursday. The focus now is “to ensure that these fruit bats living in caves are not interacting with humans” and to share sequencing information “that can be useful for other parts of the world where these species are living,” he said.
Genomic sequencing conducted at the site of the outbreak suggested the hemhorragic virus jumped from animals to humans with rapid spread and few mutations. All mining activity at the cave has been halted and assessments are being done on the people who worked there to ensure they don’t get ill, Nsanzimana said.
“We’ve brought together different teams from vets, epidemiology, genomic surveillance and lab diagnostics, to test these animals and also people,” he said. “It’s very important for the scientific community to study the animal perspective and humans, but also the environment.”
There have been 63 confirmed Marburg cases in Rwanda, making this one of the largest outbreaks. The disease has killed 15 people, including a number of healthcare workers, since the country’s first case was reported less than a month ago. That brings the case-fatality rate to 23.8%, about a quarter of what’s been recorded in other Marburg outbreaks. As many as 46 people have recovered.
Mpox Coinfection
In neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, higher cases of measles in children is coinciding with the spread of a virulent strain of the virus that causes mpox, the disease that’s killed more than 1,000 people since the start of the year.
Treatment centers are recording coinfection, especially in areas with low measles-vaccination rates, Ngashi Ngongo, head of incident management for the mpox outbreak at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said at the same briefing.
“That is really of great concern,” he said. “There is this cohort of children that have not been vaccinated” against measles who are “also in areas that have a high rate of malnutrition.”
Children younger than 15 years-old account for 38% of confirmed mpox cases.
While young children are yet to be offered mpox vaccines, acceptance of the shot has been high among those that qualify in Congo, Ngongo said.
(Updates with mpox and measles co-infection from sixth paragraph)
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